Psychos and Cats

I had noble plans for this website. I expected a post per week in the form of a blog or flash fiction. In my defense, I’ve started dozens of posts. A tiny fraction of them made it to publication.

I am depressed and anxious and have been for decades. The state of the world hasn’t helped. I feel my words here should reflect the serious topics hanging over society, but I’m too angry and frustrated to write something coherent. If a person wants to read a rant, Twitter and Facebook accounts are more than sufficient.

And so this site lies fallow.

But maybe it would be better to leave the world behind here. We can take a break from the doom and gloom and only peek into that aspect of our lives every so often. Maybe this place can be a respite from the political cluster-fuck the world has become.

This doesn’t mean my coming posts will be frivolous. Sure, I’ll post the story of the latest silly cat picture. The topics on my mind are serious, such as the depiction of mental health in entertainment. All of my fiction has characters recovering from trauma and disorders. Most people love a good psychological thriller—hell, so many people voted for Trump because “it wouldn’t be boring”. But we have so many stories of sociopaths, narcissists, and psychopaths. What about those of us with depression that doesn’t make us kill, anxiety that only affects our job, and OCD that manifests as intruding thoughts rather than Sleeping With the Enemy abuse?

We all love crazy, unless it’s in a high-functioning form. An anxious person needs to just get over it. A depressed person needs to just not let it bother them. I sat at the dinner table once and listened to someone complain about a woman with bipolar. They referred to her as lazy when she doesn’t have the legal capacity to manage her own money. But if she “just got over it” she could certainly get a job.

I want stories about the everyday mental health disorders that we feel we need to conceal. So that’s what I write. “Write the stories you want to read,” is the advice usually given.

I plan to be here more often. I’ll post about books I’m reading and movies I’m watching, all with the depiction of mental health in mind.

Plus the occasional cat picture story… because that’s mental health too.